Jayne Mulligan, a member of the Friends of the Westfield Athenaeum, sets up a display at the library to promote a calender created with photos made for the Picture Westfield project. (Photo by Carl E. Hardegen)
WESTFIELD – More than 60 volunteers fanned out across the city for a week in October 2011, for ‘Picture Westfield’ and came back with about 5,000 pictures that became a slide exhibited at he Westfield Athenaeum in March.
Those pictures have now been edited to create a calendar to benefit the Friends of the Westfield Athenaeum.
“The calendar is a spin off of the ‘Picture Westfield’ project of a year ago which was the brainchild of Kate Deviny and Eileen Doherty,” said Jayne Mulligan, a member of the support organization.
She said that she had been watching the slide show with Linda Saltus, a member of the board of directors of the Friends, and together they came up with the idea to use some of the pictures to make a fundraising calendar to benefit the Athenaeum.
Mulligan said that she and Saltus met with Doherty for months.
“Initially, I think we started in April, met a few times and then pretty much once a week throughout the whole summer,” she said.
Mulligan said that she and Saltus first came up with a theme for each month– bridges, water, churches, monuments and more – “to highlight all the different things that Westfield has to offer.”
“Once we got our themes, then it was go into the archives that Eileen had and, out of maybe a hundred barn pictures, try and come up with five or six,” she said. “So each page is laid out a little bit differently. Most of them have five or six pictures, – some have more some have less”
“We thought it would be a smaller calendar till we looked at the pictures and said ‘No, it’s got to go oversize to give the pictures their due justice. They’re beautiful. If you shrink them down you lose it’,” she said.
The resulting oversize (17 by 11 inches) glossy calendar was locally printed at Appalachian Press on heavy card stock and the first printing of 500 calendars is now available.
The last page of the calendar lists all the photographs with credits for the photographers and descriptions of where the pictures were made.
The calendar sells for $15 at the Athenaeum and at local merchants including Ezra’s Mercantile downtown, Miss Sweets on Russell Road, Soup’s On Restaurant and Café on Union Street and the gift shop at Noble Hospital as well as at the library.
Each page of a promotional calender created with images made as part of the Picture Westfield project features pictures with a common theme. Above, the page for April highlights pictures of some of the city’s monuments.
The calendar is also available on-line at www.westath.org.
Mulligan said that the calendar has been well received.
“So far, the reviews have been good. Everybody who’s seen it has liked it” she said and said that more will be printed as needed once people learn of its existence.
“I think that as word gets out it will sell itself, people just need to see it,” she said.
